The article doesn’t specifically talk about e-cigarettes, patches or nicotine gum, but says that trying to slowly wean oneself off nicotine, rather than just committing fully to a quit date and going through with it is not as effective.

From the article:

An article published March 14 in the Annals of Internal Medicine suggests going “cold turkey” is linked to the highest level of long-term smoking cessation success—smokers in the study who quit abruptly were 25 percent more likely to stop smoking completely over the long term.

The study involved 697 adult smokers whose primary end goal was to become a nonsmoker; some would try to quit abruptly and the other half would try to stop smoking gradually. (Study participants were randomly assigned to one of the two groups.) After receiving counseling from a nurse, study participants in the abrupt cessation group selected a quit date. Participants in the gradual smoking cessation group arranged to reduce their smoking by 75 percent over the course of two weeks prior to the quit date they selected, also after counseling with a nurse. All study participants in both groups received nicotine therapies such as patches, lozenges and other products to help curb cigarette cravings.

The researchers found that by the fourth week, 39.2 percent of gradual cessation group abstained from cigarettes versus 49 percent of those who went cold turkey. At six months, 15.5 percent of the participants in the gradual cessation group had completely stopped smoking compared with 22 percent of those who quit right away.

Previous research published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology suggests gradual cessation isn’t very effective because people who choose to slowly wean themselves off nicotine may be tempted to prolong smoking a little longer and drag out the process of quitting. Another study in Addiction finds that in order for gradual cessation programs to work, the motivation to quit actually really needs to exist; smokers who select this type of plan may not be completely committed to giving up cigarettes.

Twenty-two percent after six months sounds pretty grim, but having known so many people who have tried to quit smoking, I’m not surprised at that figure. It usually takes two, three, four or more attempts to quit to finally succeed. I think my brother made at least half a dozen attempts and failed repeatedly until he finally managed to quit (smokefree for about 18 months now).

Again, this study doesn’t talk about the effectiveness of gum, patches and e-cigs (smokers can ratchet down the nicotine intake with e-cigs), but I don’t doubt the results one bit. Ultimately, to quit, you simply have to get off the nicotine and stay off it, for weeks or months, before the cravings go away. This is one reason, despite the reams and reams of anecdotal evidence I’ve read online about e-cigs, (which I actually respect), that I remain skeptical of e-cigs’ effectiveness in getting people off cigarettes. Because e-cigs are not getting people off the nicotine.

Again, I believe there is no one right way to quit cigarettes — what works for one person won’t necessarily work for another person. Whatever it takes. But, it appears simply setting a date and going “cold turkey” is the most effective way, at least according to this study.

In case you didn’t need any more reasons to quit smoking. A study from the University of California, San Diego suggests that cigarette smoke makes that nasty and stubborn MRSA bacteria tougher to kill through a variety of means. (And trust me, it really sucked to look at some of the pictures when I went looking for MRSA images. Yuck… I didn’t need to see that before dinner.)

This is kind of technical, so I am just going to quote from the article rather than try to explain it myself:

“We already know that smoking cigarettes harms human respiratory and immune cells, and now we’ve shown that, on the flipside, smoke can also stress out invasive bacteria and make them more aggressive,” said Dr. Laura E. Crotty Alexander of UC San Diego and the Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System.

Macrophages, or immune cells known to devour infectious ages, were infected with both types of MRSA (smoke exposed and not) to test the immune response. Although both were able to take up the populations of MRSA, macrophages fighting MRSA exposed to cigarette smoke extract had a significantly harder time killing them.

Researchers found that this type of MRSA was more resistant to the reactive oxygen species, a chemical burst macrophages utilize once they have engulfed bacteria. MRSA exposed to smoke extract was also more resistant to antimicrobial peptides, another line of immune defense used to make holes in bacteria and cause inflammation. Even more alarming was researchers’ discovery that MRSA was able to adhere better to human cells when treated with smoke, assisting in the success of their invasion. This effect depended strongly on dose; the more smoke extract the MRSA was exposed to, the more resistant it became.

Get this, not only does cigarette smoke have this effect … so do e-cigs. From the article:

Another study conducted by researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine a year earlier suggested something similar with e-cigarette smoke; vaporized smoke can also alter the structure of MRSA’s cell wall to make it more resistant to bacteria. However, this research also discovered that surface changes to the bacteria increased 10 times more with exposure to cigarette smoke rather than e-cigarette vapor.

Haruko found this for me. On Raw Story, a bunch of creepy old Christian cartoons. (It’s been years since I’ve had one of those creepy mini-comic books jammed into my front door, but I remember them.)

Among the comics included, some pretty weird one about how a guy is headed on a path to Hell because he is teaching other kids to smoke. He offers a cigarette to a kid and the kid responds, “I have given my life to Jesus and Jesus doesn’t want me smoking even one cigarette.”

I’m really curious in what Gospel that’s in … considering tobacco wasn’t even known in the Middle East 2,000 years ago.

The kid later says, “Lord Jesus, I know you are pleased with my decision.”

Well, considering that Jesus didn’t have a problem with wine .. I’m not following.

I certainly agree that cigarettes are evil .. because they addict and kill people and destroy lives, but I’ve seen any sort of religious connotation to it.

Anyway, it was a weird cartoon with a weird message (from the 1960s by the look of it). In the end, get this, the guy who does evil as a kid doesn’t get any kind of redemption. He is run into by a drunken driver and his girlfriend killed … the message seems to be this is God punishing the guy for being evil his life. Wow, if that isn’t some effed-up perversion of what Christianity is supposed to be about, I don’t know what is.

According to newly released statistics from the the dating app Hinge, men who self-identify as smokers are rejected 89 percent of the time. In other words, they’re 61 percent more likely to be rejected than their smoke-free counterparts.

Similarly:

A survey published in February from Match.com and the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer found that 89 percent of people on Match.com preferred to date a non-smoker.

Remember, the old days when the tobacco companies promoted cigarettes as sexy and alluring. No more. Smoking is a major turnoff for a lot of people — the smell, the secondhand smoke, etc. Seinfeld was ahead of it’s time!

I love a couple of the comments on this story (I don’t comment on HuffPost anymore.)

I always thought some anti-tobacco ads should emphasize the butt breath people get from smoking. The stank in their hair, clothes, skin, saliva (yes, try kissing a smoker – ugh) is disgusting right along with the yellow fingers and teeth. I always chuckle when I see a smoker put on cologne or perfume – what’s the point? It’s like spraying Fabreeze on a turd.

I am a smoker and have no complaints with your post. It is a horrible and useless habit.

A study recently published in Neuropsychopharmacologyshows that something called the “insula,” which is part of the cerebral cortex, is thinner in the brains of teens who smoke versus teens who don’t smoke.

The insula helps govern emotions and consciousness and it also contains a lot of nicotine receptors so is part of the brain where the craving for nicotine comes from.

According to the Discover article:

“It looks like, even in these very young kids, there is a link between the structure of the insula and the extent to which they smoke and become dependent,” London said in a Neuropsychopharmacology podcast. “It was shocking. We are beginning to get a story of the functional neuroanatomy of smoking.”

Although the study illustrated a difference in brain structure of young smokers and nonsmokers, it did not establish whether smoking caused the variations. It could be that people with differently structured insulas are more likely to take up smoking for an unknown reason. However, the results pave the way for future studies to determine the actual cause and effect.

“Ideally one would start the study in 12-year-olds who haven’t begun to smoke; follow them out after they begin to smoke; and see if in fact the smaller insula thickness was a predictor of a predilection to become a smoker,” London explained in the podcast.

On the other hand, if London’s team finds proof that smoking causes thinning of the right insula, it would provide further evidence of the detrimental health effects of picking up the habit at a young age

And this is why this is important. It could be that kids prone to addictive behaviour already have this thinner insula, or that smoking creates more addictive behaviours later (I’ve long said that pot is not really a gateway drug, but cigarettes are. Almost all drug addicts started using cigarettes as their first drug).

Cigarette dependence and the urge to smoke were negatively related to cortical thickness in the right ventral anterior insula. Although the results do not demonstrate causation, they do suggest that there are effects of cigarette exposure on brain structure in young smokers, with a relatively short smoking history. It is possible that changes in the brain due to prolonged exposure or to the progression of dependence lead to more extensive structural changes, manifested in the reported group differences between adult smokers and nonsmokers. Structural integrity of the insula may have implications for predicting long-term cigarette smoking and problems with other substance abuse in this population.

Another story on the 50-year anniversary of the Surgeon General’s, this one from Think Progress.

The RawStory article touched on this, but this article deals with it more directly: Since the 1964 landmark Surgeon General’s report, more than 20 million people in the U.S. have died as a result of smoking — 2.5 million of those deaths are blamed on secondhand smoke (boy that’ll drive the Smokers’ “secondhand smoke is harmless” Club crazy.).

Think about that — what a holocaust, and that’s just in the U.S. That’s more than twice the number of people killed in Hitler’s Holocaust — only it happens in slow motion, a person there, a person here. I know I watched my mom’s entire circle of friends wiped out by smoking — almost all of her friends smoked and most of them died of cigarette-caused diseases relatively young. She smoked for 60 years and managed to outlive almost all of them.

Lots of news outlets are doing 50-year anniversary stories on the Surgeon General’s landmark report. I’m posting links to a couple of them.

This one is from RawStory (Reprinted from a French news service — thanks to Haruko for the link and there she is posting away and a bunch of people shilling ecigs– starting to see these folks all over the Internet, and am starting to wonder how many of them are paid to promote ecigs), about a 50-year anniversary report put out. Two conclusions from this report stood out for me:

1) Cigarettes are more potent than they’ve ever been.

2) And this is a big one, there’s a LOT more health risk involved in smoking than just lung cancer. The updated report specifically mentions:

…. active smoking can cause a common form of blindness called age-related macular degeneration, as well as diabetes, colorectal cancer and liver cancer.

Those who do not smoke but are exposed to second-hand smoke face an increased risk of stroke, said the report.

So, it’s right there in an official Surgeon General’s report: Smoking increases the risk for macular degeneration, diabetes, erectile dysfunction and arthritis (in particular, I’ve been looking into the ties between arthritis and smoking. Want to do a major post about that soon). This is important to me, because people tend to get hung up on idea that smoking causes lung cancer and that’s it. A lot of information has been coming out in the past 5 years about the connection between smoking and diabetes and arthritis.

For the 50th anniversary of the Surgeon General’s watershed report on smoking and lung cancer, both NBC News and CNN had for a time last weekend smoking as their top stories. Imagine my excitement seeing cigarette smoking dominating the top of both websites with so many other stories going on — Ariel Sharon’s death, Bridgegate, West Virginia, etc.

(Hey, doesn’t that Bing window look like a cigarette?)

Anyway, NBC’s take on the issue was to look at, yes the smoking rate in the U.S. has been reduced greatly since 1964, from 43 percent to 19 percent, but can it ever be reduced to 0?

Several experts weighed in. One idea was to raise the minimum age for buying cigarettes from 18 to 21. Another one, by Michael Fiore of the University of Wisconsin, is a two-pronged approach of “hard-hitting public policy. At the same time, we need the ready availability of treatments for smokers.”

Yes, I agree. Treatment should be available and covered by insurance, be it patches, Nicotine gum, or even Chantix or e-cigs (and I’m not wild about the last two, in fact, I’m not positive any health care officials consider e-cigs a “treatment.”)

NBC also cited a Harvard study stating that smoking has killed 17.7 million people in the U.S. between 1964 and 2012 (So, when I call it a “holocaust,” I am not screwing around — 17.7 million people is a holocaust.

Also mentioned in the NBC article. How to stop smoking? Stop it before people start, before nicotine’s incredible addictiveness takes hold. 88 percent of smokers begin smoking before they turned 18. Education, education, education, is the way to stop smoking.

Ah, the NBC article also talks about how the $180 billion from the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement is not being used properly to combat smoking. Instead that money is being used by states simply to help balance their general funds. States are receiving $8 billion a year from the settlement, but are only spending $640 million a year on tobacco control.

A good article from NBC News, that touches broadly on most of the major issues surrounding tobacco control.

CNN story on smoking — Why do people still smoke?

I like CNN’s angle, too. CNN asks the question of when people know how bad smoking is for you, why do they still smoke? The answer, according to CNN, a “portrait of defiance.”

CNN dug up a portrait site on smokers (Oh, man, I have to do a separate post on this site with the photog’s permission, hopefully). The photographer, Laura Noel, said that:

While shooting these portraits, she noticed the age difference among smokers. Young smokers, she said, enjoy it with a kind of practiced defiance. “You see a little more of the addiction when people get older.”

The CNN story makes a great point. The whole argument that smoking is a “personal choice” becomes complete bullshit when the smoker is no longer making the choice to smoke — the nicotine is in control. It stops being “choice” when addiction takes hold. (The tobacco industry long ago abandoned the battle trying to fight the evidence that smoking is deadly and has instead adopted a Libertarian coda that it’s personal choice. I’ve had two or three Libertarian trolls stink up this blog with their “personal choice” bullshit, too. And, oh by the way, of course, none of them were actual smokers. :roll:)

“Smokers typically start smoking as adolescents or young adults, with initial smoking occurring in social situations,” said Sherry McKee, the director of the Yale Behavioral Pharmacology Lab. “Most young smokers believe that they can easily quit at any time and nearly all believe that they won’t be long-term smokers.”

“Ultimately, they will lose their capacity to make a free choice to smoke,” said Jed Rose, the director of the Duke Center for Smoking Cessation in North Carolina. “Then 30 years later, that’s when we typically see them in our program desperately trying to quit, because now they can’t go a single day without (a cigarette).”

And one final point in the CNN story, something I actually learned. I never really thought of this, but it makes sense. The addiction to smoking is more than just the chemical components of nicotine, it has to do with the smoking behaviour.

“The chemicals in cigarettes work on the structures deep within a smoker’s brain, literally rewiring it so the habit becomes deeply ingrained,” said Rose.

With drugs like cocaine, there can be extreme discomfort from withdrawal in those first few days, but it goes away. “The behavior addiction of smoking may be far more compelling than just the short-term withdrawal symptoms of a hard drug,” he said.

That means smokers may be more addicted to the smoking behaviors than the nicotine.

“Every move a smoker makes: the lighting of the cigarette, the inhaling, all the feelings and sensations of it, the whole package becomes highly addictive,” Rose said.

I wrote about this several months ago. The cancer death rate in the U.S. has dropped dramatically in the past few years, especially for lung cancer.

Three reasons:

1) Better treatment

2) Better detection

and a big one

3) a drop in the smoking rate

According to this study from the American Cancer Society:

An estimated 1.7 million new cancer cases are projected for 2014, including some 586,000 deaths, according to the new report from the American Cancer Society. And cancer remains the second-most common cause of death in the U.S., behind heart disease.

The good news in those grim figures is that the rate of death from cancer has fallen from about 25 per every 10,000 people in 1991 to about 17 per 10,000 in 2010. That translates into about 1.3 million cancer deaths avoided, including nearly 953,000 men and nearly 388,000 women.

Lung cancer remains the top killer for both sexes, followed by prostate cancer for men and breast cancer for women. But largely because of declines in smoking, the lung cancer death rate dropped by 34 percent in 20 years.

I’ve actually had this argument with some smokers’ rights idiots, claiming “why is lung cancer going up if smoking rates are going down.” Well, I will have to remember this link if I ever run into another one. Lung cancer death rate down 34 percent in 20 years awesome. Lung cancer used to be pretty much a death sentence, less than 20 percent survival rate, but that’s improved dramatically in the last 20 years due to better treatment and better detection.

I also wonder if another factor if a higher percentage of people getting lung cancer are people getting lung cancer NOT caused by smoking. Remember, not all lung cancer is caused by smoking — about 15 percent of the people who get lung cancer never smoked a cigarette in their lives. And smoking is believed to cause a specific kind of lung cancer. There are other forms of lung cancer that don’t appear to be tied to smoking. So that could be a factor, too. Perhaps because of fewer smokers and fewer people getting lung cancer, period, that 15 percent figure has become higher. And these other forms of lung cancer may be more treatable than the cancer caused by smoking. Just a thought. No proof or evidence, just speculation.

For the Great American Smokeout last week, CNN.com interviewed 9 former smokers about their final cigarette. Most every ex-smoker can remember their last cigarette, when they finally had had enough and quashed one out for the final time. Most smokers can remember their last cigarette because it usually takes three, four or even more tries to quit, and when the day comes that quitting finally works is a big event in their lives.

So, CNN collected some awesome quotes from these nine people, citing everything from existentialism to their families as reasons for quitting. Let me share some of them:

A fellow workmate made a profound statement to me: ‘You know, Bob, there is never a good day to quit smoking, is there?’ That hit me like a ton of bricks.

— Bob Miller, last cigarette: April 1, 2006

*****

Now, when I feel that urge, I think about two small faces, and how I’d answer them if they asked me why I was sick or why I was dying. I’d have no one to blame but myself.

— Beth Woods, last cigarette, Aug. 5, 2008

*****

I remember a trip to the ER with a bad case of bronchitis. This was the first time that my husband had seen me that sick. The look of panic and helplessness convinced me that I had to stop.

— Lisa Gonsalves, last cigarette 2005

Gonsalves’ bronchitis was so severe, she had to have tubes inserted into her lungs to drain the fluid and her chest “cracked open” to clean out her lungs.

“I can’t say that I don’t crave it – especially when I am stressed out,” Gonsalves told CNN.com. “I do have to constantly remind myself of the pain and the feeling of drowning because I couldn’t breathe to keep me from running out and getting a pack. It is a very mental game I play every day but I get stronger and stronger every day without a cigarette.”

*****

When I smoked my last one, it was more of a release, rather than freaking out about how I was going to deal with it.

— John Turner, last cigarette 2011

*****

My wife got the news she was finally pregnant. The very moment she told me I crushed my pack of cigarettes up and threw them away.

— Martin C. Grube, last cigarette 1983.

*****

Then the story of Kara Wethington, who quit after her 66-year-old grandmother died.

“I loved smoking. The social aspect of it, the taste of it, the way it made me feel — everything about it was romantic to me.”

But the death of her grandmother was the “straw that broke the camel’s back” soon after Wethington herself was diagnosed with an aggressive form of strep throat, and she hasn’t looked back for 13 years.

“I’ve had smoking dreams that felt so intimately real that the line of reality and fantasy blurred out my memory. I know I didn’t smoke but sometimes those dreams feel really good and sometimes with real regret.”

(Interesting, I never heard of this dreaming of smoking before, but another ex-smoker said the same thing.

“It took me years to stop dreaming about having a cigarette and sometimes I would wake up and not be sure if I had smoked.”